I run a large small business, by which I mean that it seems to require a tremendous amount of work for the money it makes. My company runs parks and campgrounds under concession contracts with public recreation authorities, and I am currently spending a lot of time helping various parks organizations keeps parks open in a world of declining budgets.
I have been an entrepreneur in Phoenix, Arizona for ten years, before which I worked from other people in companies as large as Exxon and as small as 3-person Internet startups. I have an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a mechanical engineering degree from Princeton University.
I was a relatively early entrant into the blogging world, writing a libertarian blog called Coyote Blog. I also blog at Climate-Skeptic.com on global warming and climate change issues and at ParkPrivatization.com on trends in recreation privatization. I have written a novel called "BMOC" and several books and videos on climate change.

10/20/2011 @ 6:54PM160,569 views

Update: Fisker Karma Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52 in all electric mode (we will ignore the gasoline engine for this analysis).

Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place [by assuming perfect conversion of the potential energy in the fuel to electricity, the EPA is actually breaking the 2nd law of thermodynamics].

In the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) created a far superior well to wheels MPGe metric that honestly compares the typical fossil fuel use of an electric vs. gasoline car, using real-world power plant efficiencies and fuel mixes to figure out how much fuel is used to produce the electricity that goes into the electric car.

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis. In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19. This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

Congrats to the Fisker Karma, which now joins corn ethanol in the ranks of heavily subsidized supposedly green technologies that are actually worse for the environment than current solutions.

Postscript: I will say, though, that the Fisker Karma does serve a social purpose — Hollywood celebrities and the ultra rich, who want to display their green credentials, no longer have to be stuck with a little econobox. They can now enjoy a little leg room and luxury.

Updates: Just to clarify, given some email I have gotten. Most other publications have focused on the 20 mpg the EPA gives the Karma on its backup gasoline engine (example), but my focus is on just how bad the car is even in all electric mode. The calculation in the above article only applies to the car running on electric, and the reduction in MPGe I discuss is from applying the more comprehensive DOE methodology for getting an MPG equivalent, not from some sort of averaging with gasoline mode. Again, see this article if you don’t understand the issue with the EPA methodology.

Press responses from Fisker Automotive highlight the problem here: electric vehicle makers want to pretend that the electricity to charge the car comes from magic sparkle ponies sprinkling pixie dust rather than burning fossil fuels. Take this quote, for example:

a Karma driver with a 40-mile commute who starts each day with a full battery charge will only need to visit the gas station about every 1,000 miles and would use just 9 gallons of gasoline per month.

This is true as far as it goes, but glosses over the fact that someone is still pouring fossil fuels into a tank somewhere to make that electricity. This seems more a car to hide the fact that fossil fuels are being burned than one designed to actually reduce fossil fuel use. Given the marketing pitch here that relies on the unseen vs. the seen, maybe we should rename it the Fisker Bastiat.

Update #2: I suppose it is too late for this plea, commenters who wish to hypothesize on methodological flaws are highly encouraged to read the original linked post explaining the math. For example, a number of folks have suggested I missed the fact that refining takes substantial energy as well. In fact, the DOE methodology used doesn’t just penalize electric cars for combustion inefficiencies in the power plant, it also penalizes gasoline cars for the energy in gasoline refining and transportation.

Update #3: Here is a special bonus, Ray Lane, Chairman of Fisker Automotive, did an interview in 2009 praising the Obama Administration as the first time he has seen government successfully making private investments. His one example: Solyndra!

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Filling up my electric car takes less than $3 of grip power to drive 100 miles. Filling up your average gasoline car takes more than $15 to go 100 miles. Go figure. So in 150,000 miles, my electric car (from Toyota) has already saved me $18,000 in fuel costs. Yeah it’s great. Get these cars into mass production… and if you’re still a skeptic, watch your neighbors and friends “dump the pump”.

ra0725, you are NOT a plugin car customer. We get it. But plenty of Americans are. Plugin electric cars can serve at least 80% of the public’s transportation needs and greatly reduce our dependance on foreign oil. Not needing to use costly foreign oil is patriotic.

>> Charge it with SOLAR PANELS. Bam, you just blew both methods out of the water AND you are saving the earth!

Dude, you are SO clueless. When the whole-cycle process is dealt with — from mining to recycling — solar panels have a provable NET ENERGY LOSS, in addition to the process itself (which is basically the same used to produce computer chips) producing some of THE MOST TOXIC BYPRODUCTS known to man.

Just because you can’t SEE it doesn’t mean it isn’t THERE. Learn to look beyond the surface.

It’s not that simple neufusion. Not counting how building solar panels into the car change the weight and cut the distance you can go, or the small surface area, limiting how much electricity the panels generate, night and cloudy days cut drastically into how much electricity is made. If your suggestion is to use solar charging stations (sun ‘gas’ stations), you’d need to build them every 20-30 miles, everywhere. Solar panel and battery technology are not advanced enough to make your suggestion cost effective. That’s why hybrids, and not electric only cars are the way to go. Electric cars are good only if you stay within a 30 mile zone of home. Plus or minus a couple miles, depending on your car.

Let’s not forget that SUVs have a mind of their own, often homicidal. For example, some news headlines… “SUV jumps curb, kills woman.” or “SUV crashes into building.” or SUV speeds out of control”. You won’t find any such headlines about station wagons, pickup trucks or sedans and certainly none about hybrids.

The author has unfortunally missed the detail that the car has been equipped with a modified Entabulator. As it is a well know fact that electricity produced in a nuclear power plant has a small amount of residual radiation, the Entabulator, detecting this radiation, filters out that electricity produced from fossil fuel. The battery is charged only with radioactive electricity. This of course means that that in the electric mode, the miles per gallon is quite large, since the only petroleum products used are in lubrication. So lets give credit where credit is due – a functional electric car that the working man and house wife can use is available.